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Watch downloaded movies on DVD player?, Part 3

by Dennis Faas on May, 26 2005 at 08:05AM EDT

Infopackets Reader Don S. writes:

" Thank you for your ongoing coverage of watching downloaded movies on a home entertainment system [see: article 1 | article 2]. After reading your first article, it prompted me to email you with my solution. I recently purchased a non-wireless, standalone DVD unit that is capable of playing back .AVI, .MPEG, and almost anything else that I can throw at it. And, it only cost me $89.95. You can search the web for similar players, as they're fairly new in the market. "

My response:

$89.95 is a very reasonable price to pay for a feature-packed DVD unit; in terms of video quality, however, the same may not be true -- especially in terms of playback on large screen displays. Case and point: I just spent a little over $300 on a Harmon Kardon DVD player (model # DVD-22) which uses a specialized progressive scan technology that does pixel-by-pixel rendering (rather than the standard line-by-line) to produce superior picture quality. After hooking it up for the first time, I noticed a huge difference in picture quality, compared to the $50 DVD player that I once used with my smaller TV set. And, even at $300, the DVD-22 only plays DVDs, VCDs, JPEG, and MP3.

Your solution is indeed a great short term solution (and reasonably priced at that)! However, one other thing to keep in mind is that technology is ever-evolving, and so are video formats (I.E.: video codecs). So, for example: even though the full-featured DVD player can play .AVI files, it certainly will not be able to play them all. The reason for that is simply because not all .AVI files are produced using the same video codecs [compression schemes]. Hint: .AVI files are a type of file and are not responsible for compressing the file; similarly, a video codec is needed to compress and decompress the file format, and without it, you can't view the file.